Plant pages in the library now show a photo of the plant alongside the growing guide. The library index has thumbnails too — so you can browse by sight, not just by name.
The plant library has always had detailed growing guides, but without photos it could be hard to know if you were looking at the right plant — especially for less common herbs, natives, and ornamentals where common names overlap or vary by region.
Photos help in a few practical ways. If you're trying to identify something growing in your garden, being able to compare it to a reference image is faster than reading a description. If you're shopping at a nursery and see an unfamiliar label, you can pull up the library and see what it should look like. And if you're browsing for ideas, a visual grid is simply more useful than a list of names.
Not every plant has a photo yet — we're adding them progressively. Plants without one fall back to a clean placeholder so the layout stays consistent as coverage grows. If you notice a plant that's missing a photo or has an incorrect one, let us know.
All photos are sourced from public domain and open-licence collections and are attributed on the plant page. We only use images where the licence permits reproduction with attribution — and we display that attribution so the original photographers get credit.
Coming next: upload your own photos
The current library uses reference images from public collections. That's a reasonable starting point, but the best photos of a plant in your conditions — your climate, your soil, the way yours actually grows — come from people who've grown it themselves.
We're building a way for you to upload photos of plants in your garden and attach them to your plantings. When you add a photo, you'll have two options: keep it private to your account, or allow it to be considered for the public library. If you opt in, it goes through a review before it appears anywhere else — you retain control over what gets shared and what stays yours.
The review step exists to keep quality consistent and to make sure we're only publishing images you're genuinely happy to share. Nothing gets added to the library without passing that check, and you can withdraw consent at any point.
If the community contributes even a fraction of the photos it could, the library will end up far better than anything we could put together ourselves. Photos from real gardens, in real climates, showing what plants actually look like when they're established — not just stock imagery. That's the goal.